wtf is brainwarden?

Brainwarden is a starter kit for building a second brain, a personal collection of notes meant to hold onto your projects, deadlines, people, and ideas so you do not have to keep it all in your head. It uses Obsidian, a free note-taking app that stores everything as plain text files, and it relies on Claude Code, the AI coding assistant, to do the ongoing filing and organizing work that usually causes note-taking systems to fall apart. Setting it up takes about 20 minutes. You open Claude Code, point it at this project, answer three questions, and Claude clones the kit, checks that you have what you need, and builds your first real notes right away, including a home dashboard showing your first project and deadlines, so you never end up staring at an empty vault. Day to day, you interact with it through five simple actions. Capture lets you jot down a stray thought, like an appointment or a recommendation, and it lands in an inbox for later filing. Ingest takes a document you drop in, such as a PDF, and turns it into small linked notes if it is useful for your ongoing projects. Ask lets you question your own notes and get an answer built only from what is actually written there, with links back to the source. Review runs weekly, clearing the inbox and quietly improving a few thin notes. Research fills in open questions with sourced facts when you ask for it. The project deliberately keeps things small: no plugins, no cloud service, and no tracking, everything lives as Markdown files on your own machine, with the notes staying in your own words since the stated rule is that Claude organizes and files things but does not write your thinking for you. It is aimed at students, professionals juggling many projects and people, and beginners who never got past setting up an empty Obsidian vault, but the author says it is not meant for people who already have a working note system or who want an AI to write their content for them. It is released under the MIT license.